The Black Man's Place in South Africa eBook

We are far too apt to exaggerate both in our disparagement
and in our praise of backward people. Many people
still think, if they think at all, of the South African
Native as a being of the kind imagined by Hobbes when
he wrote: “Man in his natural state is towards
man as a wolf,” and, on the other hand, there
are still many who regard him, after the fancy of
Rousseau, as a sort of primitive man-child existing
in a state of natural innocence from which he is being
driven by the corrupting influence of the civilised
invaders. But all this is wrong. The Native
is not a savage. Even before the whites came to
South Africa the Bantu lived in social order under
a political system in which the principles of constitutionalism
were clearly recognised. To-day the Bantu are
simply a race of barbarians in various stages of transition
from a crude civilisation to a highly developed civilisation,
and we shall do well to remember that the process
of transition which we are now witnessing is one in
which individual mistakes and failures will be more
conspicuous, though no more significant, than the general
advance.

MISCEGENATION.

If it is true that the human nature of the Bantu is
no whit different from the human nature of the Europeans
then it is a fair question to ask why the two races
should not be able to live together in liberty, equality
and fraternity as people of one nation or body politic.
It is because human nature is governed by laws which,
unlike the laws of mathematics, cannot be laid down
with certainty that we find ourselves unable to give
a positive answer to this question. The human
nature of the whites, like the human nature of all
races that have been predominant before, is swayed
by the feelings of pride and prejudice that arise
through differences of complexion, physical appearance
and bodily odour, as well as the difference in racial
achievement, and these essentially human feelings,
if they remain as strong as they now are in South
Africa, will render impossible the fraternity that
implies the liberty to intermarry, so that there arises
for our consideration a second question, namely, whether
without full fraternity and social equality the two
races may yet live together in the land in political
liberty and equality.

We observe from the earliest times a rhythmic play,
as it were, of opposite forces that tends, alternately,
to build up and to break down and mingle human races,
but of the laws that underlie and govern these forces
we know little or nothing. On the one hand we
see how man has always and everywhere shown what the
advocates of so-called racial purity have called “a
perverse predisposition to mismate” which has
made it exceedingly difficult to classify existing
human varieties. On the other hand we see throughout
nature how a pronounced disparity between varieties
of the same species engenders an aversion from one
another of the different varieties which seems to